Ladies and Gentlemen...Start Your Engines!

The Race to the Information Age Has Begun.

It began in a much more quiet manner than the Golden Spike which joined the two halves of a Transcontinental Railroad exactly 100 years earlier...so much more quietly that we never knew it was happening, and we were all left standing there at the starting gate, gawking at Men on the Moon.

It all happened about 25 years ago, in 1969, but the media never put the word "Internet" on the front page of a major newspaper until the Wall Street Journal did it, on October 29, 1991...yet even so, most of you probably never heard or saw the word Internet in the media until 1994, with the 25th Anniversay hardly ever mentioned, as the idea was for everyone to think the Internet is the newest thing around, and to get us all to buy tickets for $20-$25 a month.

What is the "First Rule of Reporting a Story?"...oh yes: Follow The Money.

Right now there are 40-50 million people on the Internet-- and if someone could figure out how to make them all pay a $20-$25 fee...that would be $100 million a month or over a billion dollars a year.

Wow...if they can do that to an Information Superhighway that had been running free of charge since the 60's, might be they will figure out how to do it with those Interstate Superhighways made of concrete, too, most of them have not been running any longer than that.

The NSFNet [National Science Foundation Network] was being cussed and discussed by the powers that be in the hopes it could be dismantled at the same time most of us were first hearing about the Internet, and none of us would notice it when we were all asked to pay that billion dollars a year, for something that had been as free as the highway systems to the Information Rich/Et.i.te for all those years.

Let's Follow The Money Some More The first hard drives anyone used on the Internet were not very big in terms of how much information they would hold, but they were HUGE compared to any other hard drives every computer has used for over 15 years...they were the size of washing machines, and could not hold information as big as the Bible or Shakespeare.

Today, for 1% of the price you can get 1,000 times as much storage s.p.a.ce...2,000 times as much, if you use a modern compression program when storing your information.

The point I am trying to make here is that the price of an electronic storage device has fallen literally closer to 0 than to 1% of the price it was when the Internet started-- and this is schedule to continue for the next few decades, which means we will all be able to affort drives that will be able to hold the entire Library of Congress... .if it is allowed.

But it won't be.

There's the rub.

The point I am trying to make is that just because we will finally have the box capable of storing the entire Library of Congress...they will make sure we don't get to, ever, for we will be dead by the time anything we see today gets old enough for the copyright to expire.

Let's Follow The Money Some More Just a few months ago, the music industry completed record sales figures for any year in history, moving 1 billion of a combination of CDs, tapes, records and music videos, for a staggering $12 billion dollars.

The response to this success, a few weeks ago, was for the music industry to propose, not a rebate to their customers but just the opposite, an additional 20 years during which the music industry could have a continued monopoly on that music, and...purely incidentally...this monopoly would also be extended to books, television, movies, video games and everything else that could be copyrighted.

I think the only way to understand this is to put it in an elementary perspective such as this: Right now, you take your kid to see a movie, any movie the producers are releasing right now. Let's say your kid has been alive 5 years, under current law, that kid has to get to 80 years old before s/he can own a copy of that movie-- without the permission of the copyright holder...and the average age such kids can be expected to live is less than 80 years...thus making the copyright permanent for us or the kids we take to the movies.

The same is true for all current copyrighted materials and the music industry is trying to add another 20 years to an already "life sentence"...and this when their sales have just broken all records in history, if you will pardon the pun... .

Since the founding of the United States when copyrights or patents were proposed by Thomas Jefferson for 17 years the period was lengthened to 28 years, plus another 28 years-- and most recently to 75 years for corporate copyrights and "life plus 50 years" for individual copyrights.

That means that "Zen and the Art of the Internet," written by a 20 year old, who will be expected to live for another 55 years or so, will still be under copyright sentencing a century from now, and will be totally out of date and will be totally useless other than as a historical footnote.

If this is the response of an industry that has just had a huge record bashing year of sales, a response not to lower prices but to raise them, then we are doing something in a backwards manner in the case of copyright.

When car makers have really good years, or really bad ones for that matter, they work very hard to attract customers, with new innovations, more car for the money, financing on better terms, or whatever, and when they have record years they give their workers huge bonuses, which I am sure most of you have heard about recently, and they also compete in an aggressive manner to keep sales up.

Copyright and patents are what allow people NOT to compete in the marketplace, as least for the first decade or two a new item is in the marketplace...only now copyrights are being extended to include the entire lifetime, not only of the copyright holder, but of the audience as well.

Something is wrong.

The Information Age Is Being Ruled By The Information Rich As Surely as the Transcontinental Railroads Were Ruled For Decades By The Robber Barons.

The Information Rich had a free ride on the Superhighways, about 25 years worth of free ride, and now the Information Poor want a ride so the Information Rich are shutting down the free rides and are selling tickets...selling tickets to something which until this year was so inexpensive that it it hardly paid to figure out what to charge any person, much less any inst.i.tution.